Perry's cronies: The Shelley-Cintra-Giuliani connection

With the pay-to-play Solyndra scandal rocking the White House, presidential hopeful Rick Perry is embroiled in a mountain of crony capitalism controversy all his own. During the September 12 GOP presidential debate, Michelle Bachmann exposed the money trail behind Perry’s Executive Order mandating all 6th grade girls in Texas receive the Gardasil HPV vaccine made by the drug company, Merck, the employer of Perry’s former Chief of Staff, Mike Toomey, at the time. Merck funneled money to Perry, initially $5,000, but eventually adding up to the tidy sum of closer to $400,000, sparking outrage across Texas and now the nation.

Toomey’s just the tip of the ice berg.

A recent bill pushed through the Texas Legislature benefited the company Waste Control Specialists, owned by #2 donor to Gov. Rick Perry, Harold Simmons. Just days after the bill was signed into law, Mr. Simmons wrote a $100,000 check to Americans for Rick Perry, the super PAC supporting Gov. Perry's candidacy for president notes Debra Medina of We Texans.

Janet Ahmad, President of Homeowners for Better Building, pointed to similar problems in the construction industry. Top Rick Perry donor, Bob Perry, paid nearly $8 million in campaign contributions and sought and received his own regulatory agency called the Texas Residential Construction Commission in 2003. Gov. Perry appointed industry-connected people to that agency, including Perry Homes VP, corporate counsel John Krugh. “The resulting agency was so anti-consumer and so counter-productive that the Texas Legislature later decided to abolish it,” Ahmad concludes.

Texas for Sale

Then there’s Perry's penchant for selling off Texas infrastructure to the highest bidder, particularly to the employer of his former staffer Dan Shelley, a Spanish company, Cintra. Shelley worked as a ‘consultant’ for Cintra (in 2004), became Perry’s liaison to the legislature during the time that Cintra was awarded the development rights to the $7 billion dollar Trans Texas Corridor (in 2005), then went back to work as a lobbyist for Cintra (in 2006). He and has daughter reportedly earned between $50,000-$100,000 on lobbying for Cintra that year.

Two key bills that just passed the Texas Legislature and signed into law by Perry further illustrate the crony capitalism and pattern of governance in the Perry Administration, both of which will benefit Cintra, in particular.

SB 1420 makes 15 Texas roads eligible for public private partnerships (P3s) that sell- off Texas sovereign land/public roads to private entities in 50 year monopolies. P3s involve public money for private profits (including gas taxes and other public subsidies), contain non-compete clauses that penalize or prohibit the expansion of surrounding free routes, and put the power to tax in the hands of private corporations that result in toll rates as high as 75 cents per mile ($13/day or like adding $15 to every gallon of gas you buy). It’s selling off Texas to the highest bidder, which is the MOST expensive, anti-taxpayer method of funding infrastructure.

Four road projects under SB 1420 have already been awarded to Cintra. In fact, every single P3 for roads in Texas has gone to Cintra: SH 130 (segments 5 & 6) and I-635 and the North Tarrant Express (comprised of multiple projects, primarily on I-820) in Dallas/Ft.Worth. All have been heavily subsidized with gas taxes and other public money (see pages 2 & 3), yet Cintra walks away with a sweetheart deal and guaranteed profits. Despite Cintra’s shaky financial situation (its debt rating just got lowered due to fears of the Cintra-controlled Indiana Toll Road going into default), Perry’s highway department continues to press ahead with these extremely controversial and unpopular privatization projects.

Perry’s connection to Cintra explains why he endorsed Rudy Giuliani in the last presidential election. At the time, Giuliani’s law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, was the legal firm representing Cintra in its bid to takeover SH 121 (which eventually unraveled) in the Dallas area. Giuliani’s investment firm was purchased by an Australian firm, Macquarie, another global player in P3s at the same time his law firm was advising Cintra on the SH 121 deal. While many social conservatives were baffled by Perry’s backing of Giuliani, it was no surprise to those following the Trans Texas Corridor and Perry’s push to privatize Texas freeways.

Balfour Beatty enters the scene

Perry likes to brag ‘Texas is Open for Business’ and here’s what that means to property rights and taxpayers. The second key public private partnership bill, SB 1048, Perry signed into law will mean Katie-Bar-the-Door on selling off virtually everything not nailed down. The bill was written by lobbyist Brett Findley on behalf of another infrastructure firm, British company Balfour Beatty, and it will allow all public buildings, nursing homes, hospitals, schools, ports, mass transit projects, ports, telecommunications, etc. to be sold-off to corporations using P3s. Unlike the 50 year cap on road P3s, SB 1048 gives no limit on the length of time a P3s can last or whether such broad authority expires.

Two particularly anti-taxpayer provisions in SB 1048 are the fact taxpayers secure the private entity’s debt (2267.061 (f)) and that it authorizes public subsidies for private profits by raiding taxpayers’ money through loans from the State Infrastructure Bank.

These contracts can be negotiated in SECRET, without financial disclosures (like financing, the structure of the ‘user fees’ or lease payments, viability studies, public subsidies, or whether or not it contains non-compete clauses or other gotcha provisions). There is no meaningful public access to P3s before they’re signed, and the few guidelines created simply exist to advise governmental entities outside the public purview.

Eminent domain for private gain

P3s represent eminent domain for private gain -- the source of much of the backlash to the Trans Texas Corridor, where P3s were the financing mechanism that granted these private entities the control of not just the facility, but the right of way/surrounding property where private companies make a killing on concessions. A plurality of Texans don’t like the idea of foreign ownership of our public infrastructure and they dislike eminent domain for private gain even more.

Of course, it started with the Trans Texas Corridor, known at the federal level as high priority corridors, corridors of the future, or the NAFTA superhighways. Just in Texas, it was to be a 4,000 mile multi-modal network of toll roads, rail lines, power transmission lines, pipelines, telecommunications lines and more. It was going to be financed, operated, and controlled by a foreign company, Cintra, granted massive swaths of land 1,200 feet (4 football fields) wide taken forcibly through eminent domain.

Called the biggest land grab in Texas history, it was going to gobble up 580,000 acres of private Texas land (the first corridor alone was to displace 1 million Texans) and hand it over to well-connected global players using PPPs, who would gain exclusive rights to determine the route and what hotels, restaurants, and gas stations were along the corridor in a government-sanctioned monopoly for a half century. It was the worst case of eminent domain for private gain ever conceived.

Property rights shredded The Trans Texas Corridor, and P3s in general, represent an imminent threat to private property rights. While lawmakers repealed the Trans Texas Corridor from state statute only months ago due to the public backlash, the corridor lives on through these P3s.

So Perry basically granted government a blank check to trample on property rights and the power to pick the winners and losers — who will lose their land to benefit another, rather than restricting the power of eminent domain to matters of public necessity. If the government can steal your land, it’s tantamount to stealing your wealth. Who said Republicans aren’t socialists? P3s are just the sort of wealth redistribution they like — giveaways to their cronies and special interest friends. They’re also a BIG step in enacting the U.N.’s Agenda 21 policies where the stated goals are to abolish private property and restrict mobility.

Rick Perry’s crony capitalism wasn’t just a fleeting lapse of judgment pertaining to the HPV scandal, it’s a consistent pattern of revolving door, pay-to-play crony capitalism that Americans detest and can ill afford.

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